


i pick my poison (and its you)

by thegirl



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Child Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Jealousy, Murder, Poisoning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 01:47:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5073229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirl/pseuds/thegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based off the kinkmeme prompt: When Jon is only a few years old, Cersei goes ahead and has him poisoned, makes it look like he had been sick, because she cannot stand having a bastard in her home shaming her so. Jon dies without much pain. Afterward, Ned is grief-stricken and Cersei is able to comfort him somewhat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i pick my poison (and its you)

**Author's Note:**

> This prompt, man. It spoke to me. I hope it speaks to you too. Because lets be real, Cersei would not have dealt with Jon the same way Cat did.

Her husband has not spoken for three days.

Cersei knows it is because the bastard is dead, and knows that she has inflicted a special kind of hell upon Ned by taking his child away. But she does not feel guilty.

She was forced into this position, she reminds herself, as Ned once again does not come to dinner, and his venison goes cold next to her. She grips hard onto her knife, and viciously cuts the steak with a brutal efficiency, refusing to feel the eyes of the servants in the hall making the hairs on the back of her neck stand up on end. She had no choice. She was a lioness, and she would not be made a mockery of in her own home.

Her now childless home.

After finishing her dinner, she stood and walked through the hall, keeping her green eyes straight ahead.

Cersei did not allow her eyes to flick to where the boy had used to sit – did not allow herself to imagine what could be if the child was still there, sipping at his broth and letting his little legs swing back and forth. There was no going back.

She finds Ned in the godswood, as she had known she would. His body is bent over the freshly dug grave covered in a thin blanket of weirwood leaves, and he is whispering something he wants only his gods to hear.

“My lord,” she says, her voice steady and cutting through his prayer, “you have missed supper.”

Ned does not turn.

Cersei breathes in once, then out, and tells herself that something has to be done. Then, she picks up her skirts and walks over to his side, before kneeling next to him.

Ned looks at her as if she is a stranger.

“You will ruin your dress,” he rasps out, and she almost laughs. He does not care about her dress. But, he knows that she clings to her Westerland dresses as a memory of her old life at the Rock, and something almost like fondness warms in her belly.

“You will catch a chill,” she chides him, and places her hand over his where it rests on the white bark of the weirwood. It is as cold as ice.

“I cannot leave him.” Ned whispers, his voice breaking, and a single tear creeps down his frozen face. “I cannot leave him alone here.”

“He has left you,” Cersei tells him, “he has gone somewhere better than here, somewhere beautiful. Do not worry about him now. Come back.”

“I promised,” he says, his voice hitching, “I promised his mother. I promised I would keep him safe as long as there was breath in my body. I failed.”

Cersei forces herself not to push about the mother, the mother she doesn’t even know the name of. The mother that has kept her bed cold and her womb from quickening. She wants to, desperately, but she reminds herself that she had rid herself of any contenders to her title and position now completely, even if that was in the form of a small boy. “How could you protect him from illness?” she says instead, and thinks _or a wife with Tears of Lys._ “How could you save him from a fever?”

“I should have loved him better,” Ned says, and Cersei doesn’t think he is talking to her anymore. “I am not meant to be a father.”

“You,” Cersei says, more fiercely than she meant to, “were the best father that boy could have had.” For once, every word she says to her husband on the subject of his bastard is true. “Who else would have taken him into his own keep, had him educated like a trueborn child and risked offending a great lord on the behalf of a natural born son? He had the best short life any bastard could have wished for. You were born to be a father to many, many sons.”

Maybe, she thinks, if Ned had not shown so much favour to the boy and sent him elsewhere, then she would not have been forced to take the steps she did. Maybe this could have all been avoided, if only she had given him a son soon enough. But she was a lioness of the rock, not a miracle worker, and she could not make a child with a man that never came to her bed.

Ned is silent, but his hand slowly slips down the trunk of the heart tree and falls to his side.

“Come inside, my love,” she says again, “and let us go to bed. I will give you another son.”

Ned shivers at those last words, and for a moment Cersei fears she has gone too far, but then her husband rises from his knees to stand again. He holds out a hand to her, and Cersei takes it, not breaking the eye contact between them.

This was the start, she realized. Four long years, and it was finally the beginning of them.

“You are a blessing, my lady,” Ned says, “I cannot think of anyone else who would be so understanding. I have… I have been unfair to you. I apologise.”

“I am only doing my duty,” Cersei replies, and smiles to herself as Ned’s hand wraps around her waist, and together they walk back towards Winterfell, united for what feels like the first time in their marriage.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I hope you enjoyed, and please leave a review telling me what you thought!


End file.
